I was recently featured on the front page of the Boston Globe in an article on activists using video as a voice (excerpt below). It focused on my Sex and the Remix series and how activists are using video to create instant political commentary and disseminate alternative messages to the main stream media.

QueerCarrie, Sex and the Remix Season 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

Two weeks later I received DMCA violations for my Queer Housewives of NYC remixes. The videos were reinstated on YouTube last week, without an acknowledgment of Fair Use.

While video is our voice as remixers, there’s no guarantee it will be heard or if it will be there tomorrow. The experience represents a shifting power dynamic in the entertainment industry: as the audience, our collective intelligence grants us more creative power than ever, yet copyright holders are desperately trying to hold on to their role as gatekeeper.

QueerHousewives of NYC Remix

Click here to view the embedded video.

When Elisa Kreisinger wanted to protest the newly diminished visibility of gay characters and story lines on television, she didn’t launch a petition drive or write an angry op-ed piece. Instead, like many other members of the YouTube generation for whom the visual language is a native tongue, she found a way to have her say with video rather than words.

Kreisinger remixed scenes from “Sex and the City’’ into a pair of pro-gay narratives, and uploaded the resulting videos to her blog, drawing 21,000 hits.

“I wouldn’t have done it if it was text-based,’’ said Kreisinger, a 23-year-old Simmons College grad from Cambridge. “Things are more easily communicated through video . . . And there can be more powerful statements.’’

A growing number of young activists are turning to video as a forum for instant political commentary or an eye-catching tool to mobilize on behalf of social change. They might create videos and spread them through social-networking sites such as Facebook. They might remix existing video clips into mashups-with-messages. They might borrow from the tropes of the most popular videos on YouTube, which turned five years old last month, marrying serious substance with lighthearted style. – The Boston Globe, 3/5/2010

Jonathan will be posting his experiences with Buffy Vs. Edward tomorrow and then it will be back to our regularly scheduled remix program!

It was the very end of a long day when we were pleasantly reminded of these two remixes brought to our attention by cultural critic Mark Dery, who coined and popularized the term Culture Jamming:

Scary Mary, created by MovieMker, remixes Mary Poppins into a horror film. It is not overtly political but it is a fun example of how additive text and a new soundtrack can turn the carefully crafted Disney-fied world on it’s head.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s Raining Men is a simple yet articulate comment on the prevalence of men (and scantly clad ones at that) in the movie 300. Suburbala paired the film’s footage with the famous song by the same name, queering the gaze of the Trogans and satirizing their hyper-masculinity to reveal the homoerotic subtext of the movie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more on the one-day conference hosted by Public Knowledge, check out the web-cast from the First Annual World’s Fair Use Day.

Public Knowledge is a great resource for remix artists and vidders because they acknowledge that Fair Use is a right, not a privilege. As artist, we can only continue making new work with the hopes that the product and process decreases copyright confusion and encourages the use of new media technologies to sustain media literacy and critical thinking about popular, and proprietary, culture.

Part 4 – Francesca Coppa

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In the year 2009, copyright disputes have been taken over by robots.

On July 21^st I posted a remix video to Youtube called “Super Pork and Beans All-Stars.” It was a remixed version of Weezer’s popular Pork and Beans music video, which is owned by Universal Music Group (UMG) – my version was made of new footage that I manipulated to match the song.

Immediately after the upload, Youtube’s copyright bots recognized the UMG song on my soundtrack and disabled my video. Youtube has a built-in online tool for copyright disputes, so I used that to tell them that my work was fair use and should not have been removed. My movie was put back online right away,  but the dispute process wasn’t over.

YouTube forwarded my dispute to UMG and I was surprised to find out that UMG replied back only a day later. They told Youtube that they owned the song and that I was not allowed to use it without permission. Such a quick response from UMG makes me suspect they’re using more bots to respond automatically to Youtube’s built-in disputes. After UMG’s response, my movie was automatically taken down once again.

Luckily for me I had already learned how to deal with this from Owen Gallagher, who runs totalrecut.com and has successfully fought other Youtube takedowns. On July 23^rd, I followed Owen’s example and sent Youtube a DMCA counter-notice. These counter-notices need to be formatted in a specific way to be considered legitimate, otherwise it’s at Youtube’s discretion whether or not they ignore you. You can find a guide to how the DMCA counter-notices work at Chillingeffects.org.

I was finally notified that my video was going back online on August 12^th — around 21 days after my original posting. A big chunk of that was spent waiting for UMG to meet their DMCA-imposed deadline to seek legal action against me if they found my video to be infringing. Thankfully, nobody has yet invented a bot that can take you to court, so the deadline lapsed and my video back went online, hopefully for good.

In the year 2010, copyright disputes should be handled by people.

So I got a happy ending, but imagine if I was a career artist who wanted to dedicate more time to creating than to looking up copyright law and counter-notice procedures. Or imagine I had kids, or school, or any number of things that might be more important to me than being a copyright geek. How willing would I be to dig through Youtube’s site to find the automated dispute process? And once that automated dispute got rejected, how willing would I be to research the precise criteria required to send my counter-notice in a format that Youtube couldn’t ignore? And if I had to do this for multiple videos, and wait three weeks per submission, who could blame me for concluding that Youtube just wasn’t the place to reliably distribute my work?

Youtube is actually one of the more obliging sites for providing tools and instructions on how to exercise your fair use rights, but even there it’s a small research project for any user who may want to fight back. Meanwhile major labels aren’t even bothering to hire staff to make sure they’re not taking down legal videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has sued other content companies for abusing copyright in this way, but that has not been enough to deter the massive automated takedowns.

Others have already proposed an important step toward fixing this problem: replace the current “notice-and-takedown” laws with “notice-and-notice” ones. If UMG wants to take people’s videos down, users should have a chance to dispute it  before the content is removed. There should be no pressure on service providers to take down legal content. This ought to be a minimum, uncontroversial step, even if we put aside other legitimate arguments for expanding fair use and reducing copyright terms. Internet users should not have to fight uphill battles to keep legal videos online just so a handful of labels can save on staffing costs.

[This is a guest post for PRV by video remixer IKAT381]

Click here to view the embedded video.

In this presentation I try to showcase Political Remix Videos that, I think, transcend the standard topics of government, elections or policy and instead highlight issues of racism, injustice, environment and mainstream media. I felt is was important to present and discuss works that focus on issues relevant to marginalized and oppressed communities inside the United States – specifically videos by Jackie Reem Salloum, The Black Lantern and Theodore Lyons.

I would also like to note that at the beginning of my talk I neglected to include a shout-out to the African American hip-hop communities that perfected and popularized remix as a art form and helped infuse it into our culture over the past several decades. An important point that, I think, should be included in any discussion of remix culture. Oh and in the talk I mispronounce Aaron Valdez’s name, apologies for that Aaron.

You can watch my talk above or via the video stream coming directly from the Ars website in wmp format.

Although people participating in creating Political Remix Video may have a good sense of fair use already, many new comers to the medium, grassroots political organizations and activist campaigners are still hesitant to use copyrighted material in their media work because of the fear of legal reprisals. Hopeful this code with help shed some clarifying light on fair use rights for us all.

These guidelines are fantastic to have. Still I would encourage all DIY cultural creators and media transformers to push the legal limits – to draw outside the lines – of fair use and the law as far as is necessary in the name of participatory media and social justice.

You can download the Code of Best Practices here:
http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/fair_use_in_online_video/

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